Developing web applications with PHP is cool, especially when you have the right development tools and even with more features added in PHP 5.4. But each time I left the comfort of Intellisense in Visual Studio to develop PHP applications using Zend or Netbeans for PHP, I was not always satisfied with those IDEs' code complete features. Thus, I decided to search for any available plugin that will provide this feature in Visual Studio.

The plugin used is on from Jcx.Software Corp. It adds in the PHP templates and Intellisense support for PHP code completion. He also shows how to set up an IIS server to work with it to make it easier to test your application.

On SitePoint.com in the Server-side Coding blog there's a new tutorial that looks to help developers just wanting to get their feet wet with Silverlight to get started. Jordan Knight shows you how to build a simple applications using a combination of C# frontend and a PHP-powered backend.

You might think that it would be more difficult to use Silverlight in a PHP application, but it’s actually quite simple; you can leverage JSON, XML, or any number of communication technologies to pass data from Silverlight to the PHP backend. However, in this article, we’re choosing to go with a SOAP Web Service. I’ll first show you how to start developing with Silverlight, then cover how you set up the web service in PHP, and finally demonstrate how to access the service from your Silverlight application.

You'll also need to have the Silverlight Tools and Visual Studio installed as well to be able to follow along. He walks you through the creation of a sample project, setting up the basic Silverlight app, making a WSDL for the SOAP service and making the sample web service with PHP's built-in SOAP functionality. With that in place, he shows how to consume the service with the C# frontend and how to send a sample message back out to the application.

Elizabeth Smith has a new blog post today showing the steps you'll need to get code coverage testing up and running on your Windows extensions.

She spells out a seven step process that involves Microsoft Visual Studio (with Code Coverage support), a properly compiled PHP instance and a little familiarity with the Windows command line to get things working.

As you can see, this could be a nice automated task. Figuring out this path to madness took a lot of googling to find some information about running code coverage from the command line.

She also includes a tip on getting the .NET parts to play nice with Visual Studio.

Elizabeth Smith has set out on something she calls the Great Compile Project - her effort to get all dependencies for PHP and PECL compiled on (at the least) Visual Studio 2005 transparently and provided openly.

Anyone crazy enough to help out is more than welcome. I'm currently working on the GTK dependency stack, which will hit quite a few PHP dependencies and PECL extension dependencies in the process. And yes I'd love to submit my hacks/fixes upstream, if someone could find me some information (where do you send libiconv patches?)

Her post mentions some of the things she's already been working on to help further the cause - compiling various Open Source libraries, figuring out issues surrounding MiniGW and some examples of more complex dependency issues she's come across.

Elizabeth Smith has posted about a new toy she received from the folks at Microsoft that adds in a missing piece of development functionality on Windows - code coverage and testing.

So this evening I managed to get PHPT running my tests (they're just basic .phpt tests but run-tests is..well flakey is a nice description some days) for my winapi php extension wrapped inside a "generic test" for Visual Studio. [...] So what did all this accomplish? I now can run my phpt tests through visual studio and collect code coverage on what theyâ€™re testing. Like GCOV, only for windows.

She's also included a screenshot of what the interface and results of the testing look like in the latest Visual Studio tool.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a quick tutorial talking about how to transfer PHP scripts (without much altering, depending on the functionality used) over to be compiled into an ASP.net application. The real key is in the Phlanger software.

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. It provides PHP applications an execution environment that is fast and extremely compatible with the vast array of existing PHP code.

Phlanger allows you to compiles PHP to the MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language), use any .NET object in a PHP application and integrates well with Visual Studio.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a quick tutorial talking about how to transfer PHP scripts (without much altering, depending on the functionality used) over to be compiled into an ASP.net application. The real key is in the Phlanger software.

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. It provides PHP applications an execution environment that is fast and extremely compatible with the vast array of existing PHP code.

Phlanger allows you to compiles PHP to the MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language), use any .NET object in a PHP application and integrates well with Visual Studio.